HOT STUFF: What Moore and Gebbie get about sexual fantasy is that in the heat of the moment, we can be turned on by anything.

There are many old conflicts being played out in the argument over whether there’s a difference between pornography and erotica: male versus female; images versus words; explicitness versus suggestion. Pornography tends to be associated with the first half of those oppositions, erotica with the second. At bottom (or top), the difference between porn and erotica, a difference I don’t believe exists, is a class argument, with proponents of the latter claiming their sexual fantasies and desires are more refined and enlightened than those of the obviously coarser orders. Their position could be summed up by this imagined distinction: “If it puts me in mind of being fed ripe grapes on a summer’s day by a lusty woodsman, it’s erotica; if it gives you a hard-on, it’s porn.”

Lost Girls, the new slipcased three-volume work by writer Allan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell) and illustrator Melinda Gebbie, is out to destroy those distinctions. Being a graphic novel, it gives equal weight to images and words. Being a collaboration between a man and a woman, it takes sexual fantasies beyond the provenance of any one sex or orientation. Most of all, being both elegant and explicit, refined and raunchy, it aims to obliterate the idea that there’s a difference between pornography and erotica. Lost Girls is proudly self-proclaimed porn that wants to appeal to our imaginations as well as our bodies. Moore and Gebbie want to leave their readers wet, hard, and dreaming.

The tale is set in an Austrian hotel shortly before the outset of World War I, a place that calls up the kind of European elegance, luxurious and dying, that you find in the fiction of Arthur Schnitzler or Stefan Zweig. A clue to what lies ahead is the volume that the rotund and worldly owner, Monsieur Rougeur, has placed on the night stand of each room. M. Rougeur’s “White Book” is a compendium of erotic stories that he claims the likes of Apollinaire and Oscar Wilde have written and that are illustrated by the likes of Alphonse Mucha, Aubrey Beardsley, and Egon Schiele, or by some extremely talented forgers. It’s the establishment’s Gideon Bible, and it’s a fitting symbol for Lost Girls, whose authors have fashioned themselves as evangelists of the erotic.

And also, you might say, as cultural archivists. The three principals of Lost Girls are the wealthy Alice, an aging but still sexually active lesbian returned to Europe from South Africa, where her family had sent her to oversee their diamond mine and so rid themselves of the scandal she’d brought upon them; Dorothy, a rich and horny young American; and Wendy, the reserved bourgeois English wife of a stuffy older man, an engineer who’s ignorant of his wife’s desires and women’s desires in general. These three are also the heroines of the most famous works by, respectively, Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and James M. Barrie. Making one another’s social, and then sexual, acquaintance, they spin out the tales of their individual sexual awakenings. In other words, how each one ventured through the looking glass, onto the yellow brick road, into Neverland.

Interview: Gabourey Sidibe "While reading the book, I realized that I knew this girl in so many different people. Not just girls but boys, and not just black people but white and Asian and Indian."

Infinite pleasure Admit it, fellow scribblers. You'd sell your soul to come up with an opening sentence like "Of the things we fashioned for them that they may be comforted, dawn is the one that works."

Go back in time Last weekend was Pride weekend here in Portland, and though rain made its own appearances occasionally, it didn't stop hundreds — even thousands — of people from, well, coming out and celebrating.

Reaction Jackson There was Michael the living, breathing, singing performer and Jackson the commercial spectacle. We surrendered to the former, he to the latter.

Retro rocket Andrew Fleming’s Nancy Drew kicks off with a mystery that eluded even our supersleuth.

Ride, don't drive This summer, with price gouging at the pumps at an all-time high, motoring vacations promise to be an even more miserable travel experience than usual.

Father knows least Say what you will about not judging a book by its cover, the bill-ringed rubber ducky adorning the jacket of Neal Pollack’s Alternadad leaves little waddle room.

Dead ringers The Doublemint Twins in The Parent Trap would not be out of place on Berkshires stages this week.

Moz-a-mania The disappointing thing about Henry Rollins — otherwise a paragon of American manhood — has always been the fact that he is, in public at least, a Moz basher.

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SLIDESHOW: THE CHEAP NEAR-THRILLS OF SEXYTIME | December 14, 2012 With porn so privately accessible now, we don't worry about the stigma attached to its consumption, the thought of someone pausing to peruse the art in front of an adult movie theater (hell, the thought of an adult movie theater) instead of just ducking in before being seen is almost touching.

BUNNY YEAGER’S NAKED AMBITION | October 05, 2012 Pin-up photography has served so many purposes — outlet for male desire; outlet for feminist ire; retro kitsch emblem — that it has barely been talked about as photography.